In this chapter, we put the sixty episodes into their economic and political contexts. As suggested in Chapter 1, we assume that the contentiousness of the episodes, the endogenous interaction dynamics that developed in the course of the episodes as well as their outcomes are crucially shaped by the economic and political contexts into which they are embedded. We shall introduce above all two aspects of the political opportunity structure of the challengers in a given episode – the economic problem pressure and the political problem pressure that the government were facing at the outset of the episode. We shall first take a closer look at the development of the economic crisis in the twelve countries and its relation to the severity of the episodes. The depth of the economic crisis has had an impact on the severity of the proposed policy measures. Next, we turn to the political context. In this respect, all of our countries are European democracies, but some of these democracies are of a higher quality than others – in terms of participatory structures and state capacity. The higher the democratic quality, the greater the capacity of the government to deal with economic pressure, and the greater the chance that challengers will get a fair hearing. We shall present some indicators for the quality of the democracy in the various countries under study. Our focus will, however, be on episode-specific aspects of the political context that are likely to have directly shaped the development of the episodes. First among these is the type of government – center-left, center-right, or technocratic – that proposed the policy measures, as well as the timing of the proposals with regard to the government’s tenure. We know from Roberts (2013, 2017) that left-wing governments are much more vulnerable than right-wing governments when they are forced to adopt austerity measures. We shall identify the types of government that were responsible for the various episodes, and analyze their electoral vulnerability. Finally, we shall analyze the timing of the episodes with respect to the political context. We shall show that the timing depends on the combination of political pressure from international actors and strategic considerations of the government.

A series of escapes

For more than a decade, European states and societies had been rocked by severe disruption. Unprepared, unprotected, they withstood it as best they could.

Four acute crises caught the collaborative venture off guard: the banking and euro crisis (2008–12), the Ukraine crisis (2014–15), the migrant crisis (2015–16) and the Atlantic crisis of Brexit-&-Trump (2016–20). Four times the patiently constructed decision-making factory that served the market, the currency and freedom of movement was pummelled by divisive forces. Four times government leaders, ministers, commissioners and central bankers hurried to Brussels, Luxembourg or Frankfurt for “last chance” consultations, in which they reshaped the European Union. Four times too, all across Europe, a polyphonic public climbed onto its seats to jeer or applaud, occupied squares, waved flags and won back the power of the ballot box in renewed, intense engagement with the political drama taking place on the European stage.

Riding the waves of each crisis, prophets of doom announced the end of the Union. The most eager among them provided a date. “In a matter of months” the euro might well be finished, predicted top economist Paul Krugman in May 2012, while his colleague Willem Buiter spoke of “weeks, it could be days”. In early 2016, when one European internal border after another was shut in response to chaos on the external borders, Commission president Juncker imagined in his New Year press conference the end of Schengen, the internal market, the euro. After a majority of British voters decided in June that year to leave the Union – and even more so when, the following November, American voters elected Donald Trump president – many were again certain that the hour had come. Member states would fall like dominoes – Brexit Nexit Frexit – until no Union remained.

Yet the European Union survived those four formidable crises. The euro is still with us. How come? Observers always underestimate the invisible glue that holds the club together.

A threefold response

As an event the coronavirus crisis is reminiscent of those concentric ripples that form when a stone is tossed into a pond. The first circle represents the immediate impact of the virus: fear, sickness, death. The next stands for the initial protective response, such as the closing of borders, while the third expanding circle is that of increasing unemployment and shrinking economies. The fourth and final circle represents geopolitics. How great powers manifest themselves on the world stage during such a crisis – which depends in part on how successfully they have tackled it at home – can determine essential global strategies for years if not decades to come.

A chronicle of the European response to the first three consequences of the pandemic – for public health, freedom of movement and economic activity – makes clear how, in essence, events-politics works. The fourth consequence, its geopolitical impact, deserves a separate analysis, which follows in Chapter 5. In the unprecedented dilemmas with which the Covid crisis confronts policy-makers, these three consequences can rarely be addressed separately, yet the lens of events-politics focuses best when they are each taken in turn; this is why the chronicle in this chapter proposes separate timelines, in part parallel (within each Act), in part sequential. To absorb and parry the shock to public health, the Union, poorly equipped, could at the start do little other than improvise a response. In recent crises it had gained experience in border politics and financial policy, so in those two areas we should in theory have been able to expect a more rapid and effective performance.

Each government is responsible for the health of its own citizens, according to the rules of the Union. What

Masks and bleach

On 6 February 2020 the Chinese president reported to his American colleague by phone on the coronavirus epidemic in his country. After a huge effort, it was now under control, How few Europeans understand how to smile; a couple of elderly French ministers, a couple of elderly Italian finance ministers, three English lords. Someone recently claimed he had never seen a German smile… But the Chinese people with their four-thousand-year-old culture receive splendid training in smiling. For it is neither more nor less than a discipline… Why after all make an angry or sad or disillusioned face? Why bare your soul in public? Yvan Goll, Die Eurokokke One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. Susan Sontag, Aids and its Metaphors Masks and bleach On 6 February 2020 the Chinese president reported to his American colleague by phone on the coronavirus epidemic in his country. After a huge effort, it was now under control, 148 pandemonium said Xi Jinping, and China's economic growth would quickly resume. President Trump expressed admiration for the rapid building of emergency hospitals by Beijing and said he was ready to send experts and assistance. A routine call.

Yet the implication of the conversation did not escape the American. The next morning he told a journalist, “This is deadly stuff, more deadly than your strenuous flu. You just breathe the air and that's how it's passed”. Whereas in European capitals at that moment only virologists saw orange warning lights flashing, in Washington news of the potential magnitude of the danger was quickly passed up to the highest political level.

Berlin, more than anywhere else, is powerfully aware that the public's ordeal in the pandemic can produce heaves and landslips, abrupt shifts and emotional eruptions in the European landscape, jeopardizing stability and mutual trust. It was this realization that led Angela Merkel to change course in May 2020 and lend special help to the countries affected.

Without the experience of the euro crisis, that decision would never have been contemplated. Old and new events interact and influence one another. Temporal sediments (to paraphrase Reinhart Koselleck once again) are constantly shifting. This demands of the politicians, who manoeuvre us through time, a seismographic sensitivity to aftershocks and displacements. The German chancellor noted how in the spring of 2020 harsh experiences from the previous decade surfaced. When €240 billion was made available in pandemic loans, Italy refused to accept the conditions – “our country is dying” said the leaders in Rome and Madrid – and so the money had to take the form of grants. Nor was it possible to ignore the fact that the Italian public's trust in the Union was plummeting and for two out of three Italians, leaving had become an option.

Shifts in the public sphere are pure politics. The outcome is not just the sum of objectifiable forces (such as a country's trade balance, arsenal or technological capabilities) but also, indeed above all, a matter of humour and sentiment, gratitude and rancour, memory and expectation, words and stories, expressed in mostly unstable balances and changing majorities. Yet that is no reason to dismiss the public mood as fickle. It can be read, felt and influenced. Moreover, public opinion holds tremendous power within it, capable of pushing aside or shattering many supposedly objective realities. A fact that became visible during the pandemic; rarely before had the public been such a catalyst for big innovative decisions in the Union.

The Hague and other Northern capitals also read the coronavirus crisis as a sequel to the euro crisis, but in revealing contrast to the chancellor in Berlin, they saw it as a simple repeat, the same collision once more. So they missed or ignored three major changes in the public and political sphere.

A public affair

“Where is Europe when you need it?” was the question asked everywhere in the spring of 2020 as the virus sowed sickness and ruin in that part of the world. An initial cry for help in Italy and Spain, it reverberated across the Union and soon echoed back as a sneering gibe from Moscow and Beijing, and even from Brexit London. The situation was of course grave. On 11 March 2020, the WHO declared the Covid outbreak a worldwide pandemic and two days later it identified the European continent as its epicentre. That professional assessment by the global health authorities shook a continental sense of safety. “Here? At home?” Meanwhile images of virologists in spacesuits, abandoned dead in hospital corridors and cavalcades of Covid coffins fed the fear for life and limb. Against this macabre backdrop it was striking that the European Union at first did nothing at all to ease the suffering, and the breathless defence that the Brussels institutions had no formal competence in the field of public health was experienced as feeble in the extreme.

The actions of the European states and their Union in the Covid crisis should be judged through the lens of eventspolitics. History was knocking at the door. On such occasions a lack of formal powers is no excuse (nor necessarily a reason for criticism). What counts is the capacity demonstrated in the situation at hand to engage jointly in events-politics, to identify and parry a shock affecting all citizens, to improvise, to convince straight away and, by extension, to anticipate events and strengthen the system. This benchmark is dynamic and relates specifically to the active deployment of political responsibilities.

The cry of despair grows louder. In the final winter weeks of 2020, an insidious virus seeds itself across an inattentive continent, pitching tens of thousands into a life-and-death battle. Most European states secure their borders, millions of households lock their front doors, while day after day television news programmes tally the dead and honour doctors and nurses as if they were soldiers going off to war. Military columns bearing Lombardy's Covid coffins; abandoned and lifeless Madrid care homes; mobile crematoria in Wuhan: hellish scenes flash by, feeding fears of social contact and infection. In Europe a disaster is unfolding, but there is no joint response. No action.

The loudest cry comes from Italy, hit by the virus early on. Appeals for help go unanswered and bitter reproaches ensue. “If in this hour of truth we receive no support, then we’re better off outside the Union”, is the sentiment, echoed, if less shrilly, in Spain. Elsewhere too, the slow, feeble reaction of the European institutions contrasts starkly with the personal tragedies in hospitals and care homes from Bergamo to Madrid, Mulhouse or Tilburg. The hastily closed internal borders are regarded as another scandal. If the Union cannot guarantee freedom of movement, its biggest boast for so many years, if freedom of movement actually becomes a source of danger, then irrelevance and implosion threaten.

It is striking how quickly the concerns and admonitions are transformed into doubts about the survival of the European Union itself. All over the world the unknowns of the coronavirus are demanding the utmost of leaders and populations. The speed of its spread, epidemiological uncertainty and social confusion put all political systems to the test. In China Covid-19 shines a light on the weaknesses and strengths of an authoritarian state. After an embarrassing phase of denial and censorship, Xi's government deals resolutely with the calamity. In the United States the pandemic makes a fool of the president, an impulsive leader in a time of crisis, as within sight of an election he zigzags between the obscenity of hundreds of thousands of deaths and the price of a lockdown.

Rules-politics and events-politics

The feeling that the slightest hiccough can take the European Union to the edge of the abyss is attributable to the metamorphosis it has undergone over recent decades, from a structure devoted purely to “rules-politics” to a set-up also capable of engaging in “events-politics”. But insight into this gradual transformation is lacking. We will not understand the new Europe as long as we continue to look through the lens of the old.

That a revolution is happening before our eyes is the central tenet of this book. Over the past 30 years the operating procedure of the Union has changed fundamentally, with regard not just to who takes the decisions, and how and where they are taken, but to the way the Union is perceived, the way people observe European politics and why now more than ever they are demanding a direct say in a shared political life. It is a process of slow trends, shifting power relations and altered mentalities. All these changes have been accelerated, and sometimes exposed, by the acute shock of the pandemic. The urgency of the Covid crisis makes an interim analysis indispensable. What is happening? What has changed?

The institutions of the Union were originally designed principally to create a market and keep it in balance. This rules-politics is an ingenious mechanism that produces consensus and support, but it works only within the agreed system, and furthermore by dint of the fiction that history proceeds along predictable lines. In events-politics the aim is to get a grip on unforeseen, unanticipated situations. This form of political action is played out not within an established framework but precisely at moments when the framework itself is put to the test, in the most extreme cases by a war or catastrophe. In 2008 it was the credit crisis, when the economy refused any longer to adhere to the models relied upon by government bureaucracies. The response to an unforeseen situation can sometimes be to create a new regulatory framework, in which case we witness an interaction between events-politics and rules-politics, in a fairly common sequence. However, an acute political crisis demands that exceptional decisions are taken (not something that rules-politics is geared to).